The Sins of the Father Generational Conflict, Vergangeheitsbewältigung, and the Creation of a Militant Generation

The Sins of the Father Generational Conflict, Vergangeheitsbewältigung, and the Creation of a Militant Generation Umberto Angilletta History Major, Senior Year The Douglas R. Skopp Creative Competition on the Theme of the Holocaust Spring 2013 Angilletta 2 Ghost: I am thy father’s spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres… Hamlet: … The spirit that I have seen May be a devil, and the devil hath power T’asssume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me… Shakespeare, Hamlet, Acts I and II Angilletta 3 Learning and understanding one’s national history is essential in developing one’s identity as a citizen of a nation; to learn, as an inheritor, the significance of what it means to be a part of a people or system that has persisted through time and developed into the society one lives in; it helps to ensure the continuation of a prideful tradition, usually by stressing the importance of heritage, unity, courage and principles. Two groups that are arguably the most influential in the development of one’s historical notions are our parents and teachers who initiate this process. Through these incredibly influential figures we are introduced to legends, historical and mythical, that support and explain our development and identity. Usually, these tales are meant to invoke pride, to create a desire within the child to willfully support their nation and national endeavors when they reach adulthood. However, a problem is presented, that not all national histories are a timeline of glorious achievements and contributions. Political governance, international relations, and domestic social policy of a nation are often underscored with tainted histories of prejudice and violence. In many developed countries, the worst instances of such are far enough in the past, or so everyone would like to think, where there could be a distinguished divisive line between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Or they occur on foreign soil, allowing the mind and media to distinguish the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’. But what about when the situation transcends prejudice and manifests itself as hatred? When violence becomes an orchestrated atrocity? How then, does one teach their youth that they are the inheritors of a state gone awry, only to be corrected by war? Such was the dilemma faced by Germans after the Second World War, with the shame of the Holocaust subject to publicized international debate. Unlike the Reign of Terror, or the religious persecutions of the Middle Ages, the Holocaust could not be looked at with any significant historical delay. It is much easier to cope with injustices committed by their ancestry centuries earlier, but how does one tell their children that they supported, participated in, or were apathetic to the organized, mechanized, Angilletta 4 macro-scale murder of the Holocaust? How does someone look in the mirror and say, “I am a murderer,” even if by default? Such has been the challenge for Germany since the arrival of the Allies in 1945; upon their realization that the Nazi dream had turned into a European nightmare. Coined by the German historian Hermann Heimpel, the idea of the Vergangenheitsbew ltigung addresses the issue of coping with a disgraced history; according to Dr. Tobias Freimüller, the phrase means “to overcome, or to come to terms with the past.” 1 Denazification, the efforts to remove all traces of Nazism from German society and politics was aided by the Allied involvement in post-War Germany – but, as implied by the term Vergangenheitbew ltigung , Germans had a much larger task to undertake than ensuring Nazism did not experience resurgence in politics. They must explain to themselves, and to their children, how the Holocaust happened during their generation, and importantly, why. This task, for many, was too tough of a pill to swallow. The Holocaust was not discussed in great detail in West Germany during the years immediately following World War II and the subsequent Nuremburg Trials. The 1950’s were a period of solemn reflection for West Germans; those who came of age during the decade after the War had experienced serious poverty and hunger during their youth, they also certainly had reason for disdaining politics and politicians. Their apparent lack of faith in politics, historian Stuart Drummond suggests, gave the impression to the international community that it was the “apathetic generation without ideals, concentrating upon purely material questions and refusing to look back at the past or forward into the future.” 2 Rather, Drummond argues that the behaviors of the 1950’s youth revealed their wary skepticism of the Federal Republic, cautious that the welfare society would give out or prove disastrous as they warily began the process of Wiederaufbau , or post-war reconstruction. Juxtaposed with the 1Tobias Freimüller, “Is Vergangenheitsbewältigung Germany’s Most Successful Export?,” Goethe Institute, translated by Chris Cave, http://www.goethe.de/ges/pok/dos/dos/ern/vgp/en2267663.htm (accessed April 14, 2012). 2Stuart Drummond, “West German Youth in the 1970s,” The World Today 28, no. 8 (Aug. 1972): 360. Angilletta 5 experiences of Germany during the 1940’s, West Germans experienced a cultural calm, a period that allowed for West Germans to forge a new, post-Holocaust identity, without actually confronting the Holocaust. Drummond says the youth were “a cool generation, free from romantic illusions, pragmatic and individualist, perhaps cynical and selfish but one not likely to fall victim to empty slogans and scholastic formulae.” 3 They were, as much of the rest of the world, enjoying the seemingly calm post-War atmosphere, but ever cautious that it may end, especially as Cold War brewed. This rocky calmness would last until into the 1960’s and would be challenged by what Drummond saw as a new generation that may possibly have “anarchical outbursts in reaction against the suffocating atmosphere of the comfortable welfare society”. 4 A new generation would come of age in the 1960s, and if the previous generation had been labeled apathetic, the youth in the 1960s would represent a stark contrast. Whereas the first post-War generation remained focused on reconstruction and stabilizing West Germany, the 1960s generation would come to confront the Reich-era population, their parents, professors, and politicians in whose conduct during the Nazi regime they saw serious moral blemishes. Adolf Eichmann was a German National Socialist bureaucrat responsible for helping to facilitate the Holocaust; Israeli Mossad agents captured him in 1960 while living in hiding in Argentina. Eichmann was brought to Israel to be tried in a highly publicized trial that began in 1961. Eichmann was convicted and sentenced to death before an international audience. His trial and conviction were unique in that Eichmann had no direct interaction with the crimes of which he was convicted; rather, it was argued that he made it possible for the atrocities to occur, an accessory to the Holocaust. His trial, according to German academic Anat Feinberg, was the first to have the Endlösung or Final Solution at the center of the judicial proceedings, she writes of the difference between the Nuremburg trials and Eichmann’s, “the emphasis was put on war 3 Drummond, “West German Youth in the 1970s,” 360. 4 Drummond, “West German Youth in the 1970s,” 360. Angilletta 6 crimes, crimes against peace and against humanity. The Endlösung was thus only a side issue. With Eichmann’s trial in the court peopled by survivors, the spotlight for the first time was on the crime against the Jews.” 5 Adolf Eichmann came to represent the greater German populace whose voluntary compliance with, or lack of resistance to, Nazi policies that made it possible for grave human rights violations to occur, Feinberg writes that “Eichmann has moreover become an archetype of the Nazi persecutor, or, as he is often referred to, an “administrative murderer.” 6 The social implications of this trial was profound, it created a distinct generational divide between the youth and the older generations. The elders were viewed by the youths as participants in the Holocaust, like Eichmann. According to historian A. Dirk Moses, “There is no doubt that many German children felt polluted, and even saw themselves as victims of their parents and grandparents.” 7 To the perpetrator generation, the youths ascribed Kollektivschuld, an irredeemable collective guilt. 8 There developed a suspicion of authority and distrust of the ‘old’ institutions. The Eichmann trial effectively publicized and legitimized the widespread cultural guilt Germans were trying to escape. They had, in years previous, preferred to focus on restructuring and reestablishing a new Germany, but with the onset of the Eichmann trial, West Germans in the 1960’s were obligated to address their past. The youth would come to actively engage the older generations in debate and question their morality and rightful use of authority. They would come to see themselves as the ‘liberators’ of a Germany plagued by a hushed guilt. For their society to progress, they reasoned, collective sins must be amended for, and future instances of authoritarian control must be resisted. To counter the stigma that the people of Germany had ‘lost their way’, and the nation was therefore ‘abnormal’, Chancellor Helmut Kohl said of the 5 Anat Feinberg, “The Appeal of the Executive,” Monatshefte 78, no.

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